(RNS) — Before the last conclave, Ulrike Heckl found herself looking at photos of the cardinals who were preparing to elect the next pope and wondering at the enormity of the responsibility on their shoulders. In that moment, she had a simple thought: “They need prayers.”
A friend of Heckl’s was leading YOUTH 2000 Germany, a Catholic initiative focused on retreats, adoration, pilgrimages and other spiritual activities for young people. And together they created Adopt a Cardinal, a site where people around the world could come and be randomly assigned to pray for one of the cardinals at the 2013 conclave.
In Athens, Georgia, Anne Marie Vencill read about the website and found the idea appealing. “We’re so removed from what happens with the universal church here,” she explained in a phone interview. “When something like the conclave happens, you can read all about it on social media, but how do you as an individual engage?”
Vencill told her friend Ellen Ritchey about the site, and the two of them signed up. “I thought, ‘That sounds kind of interesting,’” Ritchey agreed with Vencill that it was “a way to be a little more engaged with everything going on.”
Both were assigned cardinals from other parts of the world, men they had never heard of. While Vencill did a little research on her cardinal, George Pell of Sydney, Ritchey didn’t feel any great urgency to do so. “He was just my person to pray for,” she explains. “It wasn’t like the Sweet 16. You weren’t praying for them to be pope. You were praying for them to have wisdom, to be open to the Holy Spirit.”
But then on March 13, 2013, Ritchey was shocked to get a text from Vencill: “Your guy is the pope.”
“The fact that I knew he was this person who was there and a part of this process, and then he was elected, it kind of blew me away,” Ritchey said.
Before she texted Ritchey that day, Vencill remembers being “at the ironing board when the white smoke went up and announced that it was Cardinal Bergoglio.”
Over half a million people around the world were participating in Adopt a Cardinal when Francis was elected. And Heckl was awed by the creative ways people approached her idea.
“We heard back from families printing out the picture of their Cardinal and giving it a place in their prayer corner and their family prayer times,” she recalled in an email. “There were school classes making this a project where they would find out about their Cardinals, their countries and their tasks and praying together for them.” Some parishes, she said, also had the idea of writing the names of all the cardinals on slips of paper for older parishioners who didn’t use email and letting them pick a cardinal out of a basket.
Years later, they were still getting emails from people who had participated, talking about how they continued to pray for “their” cardinal.
“It brought tears to my eyes,” Heckl said. “There are such wonderful people out there, it really gives you hope. The thought that we could play a little part in this is deeply rewarding.”
After Francis died, Ritchey went back to the Adopt a Cardinal website and found a “poignant picture” of Francis looking away, as though undertaking a journey on which we couldn’t follow. The website promised that it would be providing names again soon. And as of the end of last week it is again up and running. After prompting for an email address, the site immediately offers the name, diocese and photograph of a cardinal. Heckl says they take particular care, as well, to make sure every cardinal gets an equal number of people praying for them. “We want each of the Cardinals to be prayed for.”
This time around Vencill has been sharing the site with many people. “My 83-year-old mother has even adopted a Cardinal,” she said. “She travels in more conservative circles than I do. She told me, ‘I got the one I didn’t want. The Holy Spirit has a funny sense of humor.’”
Vencill is finding that sharing the site with others is deepening her experience even further. “It’s really fun to dialogue about it,” she says. “There’s the excitement of ‘I got this guy,’ ‘Oh, I got this guy,’ and going to look them up and learn their views.
“It makes the conclave feel much more personal. It isn’t just us waiting for something to happen over there. It’s happening here, too, and I have a tiny part to play.”
Ritchey agrees: “It involves the lay community in the process.”
“We’re one body in Christ,” Heckl says. “Adopt a Cardinal is a moment where we’re able to get a glimpse or a feel of the power of the Catholic Church as a worldwide universal church. It was and is such a blessing to know you’re united in prayer with so many others.”
For Ritchey, Pope Francis’ papacy was characterized by the desire to empower the laity. “He was a pastor,” she said. “My highest hope is that the conclave will pick somebody who can pick up where he left off, continue the synodal process and continue looking at all these possibilities, like the diaconate for women, because we need it.”
A conclave is more than just the cardinals involved, says Vencill: “If the process is followed as it’s outlined, there’s room for the Spirit to come in.
“If we just let go and give the Spirit room to work, she’ll do fabulous things.”
